The Right Tool for the Right Job: Assessing Model Transformation Quality

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a software engineering discipline in which models play a central role. One of the key concepts of MDE is model transformations. Because of the crucial role of model transformations in MDE, they have to be treated in a similar way as traditional software artifacts. They have to be used by multiple developers, they have to be maintained according to changing requirements and they should preferably be reused. It is therefore necessary to define and assess their quality. In this paper, we give two definitions for two different views on the quality of model transformations. We will also give some examples of quality assessment techniques for model transformations. The paper concludes with an argument about which type of quality assessment technique is most suitable for either of the views on model transformation quality.